Unholy Sonnets and Psalm: First Forgive the Silence

Mark Jarman

Unholy Sonnets

The yellow blister wears a ring of red.
King Christ will pick among the quick and dead.
The black nail hangs, half-hinged, a beetle's wing.
The Lord is not a person, place, or thing.
Ignore the canker sore another day.
The Virgin stares at candles in a tray.
Hair sheds on the fat pillow during sleep.
High heaven is as vague as hell is deep.
Deep in an obscure chamber of the ear
A phone rings. No one answers. For a year.
And then another year. And then there comes
The Saint of Getting-Used-To-It, with drums
To drown the irritation in white noise,
Until the final silence and its cause.

*

I think of Gosse, watching his father paint
Anemones from tidal pools in Devon
(Long plundered by the time Gosse remembered them):
All the boy knew of art were these watercolors
With Latin names for captions, an extravagance
Indulged for science, checked by a firm faith.
And there was also the book his father wrote
To reconcile the Bible and Charles Darwin-—
Greeted with scorn. I think of Gosse writing
About the days alone with his mother's illness
And afterwards with his father's loneliness.
He saw and heard the marine biologist pray
As if he could, by word and gesture only,
Pry open the mute heavens like a bivalve.

*

She is a cloud in her own sunny day,
he damp spot on a rock under the lip.
She is the flaw that cracks the fired clay,
The bubble that will break the binding slip.
She is the world after the rapture comes,
The one left in the field, the one left grinding.
History over, she's the drop that drums
In drainpipes without anybody minding.
She is the definition of alone.
And I am one who makes things up about her,
The way the sky makes weather for the earth.
And she is one who lets that happen to her,
The way the dirt will let you take a stone
Into your hand and calculate its worth.

Psalm: First Forgive the Silence

First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.

Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.

Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.

Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.

Visit Mark Jarman as Image Artist of the Month for March '01

Issue #9 • Spring 1995